Punditry vs News

I was listening to the Vox podcast, The Weeds, and they happened to mention that they developed their own in-house model for the election that predicted a Trump victory. No one could believe it, so they ignored it, and in fact, one of their writers criticized Nate Silver’s model for not being more pro-Clinton in its probabilities. Nice Job, Vox.

Anyway, it’s a good reminder that a lot of what passed for news/journalism is really just punditry. Some pundits are pretty good, but few of them are so scary smart that we should listen to every word they say. Most of the time, they have the same information we do, but have a platform we lack. So why do we listen to them? For me, the main factor lately was complacency. I never thought Trump would win, so I didn’t need to keep looking into it. Clinton would win, and however messy it got, it would work itself out in the end. I don’t know had I paid closer attention, if I would have come to a different conclusion, but no longer will I pay so much attention to pundits.